The Biggest Deal of the Year!

[00:00:00] Hi, I'm Eric Newcomer. And I'm Madeline Ryn Barker. And this is the Newcomer Podcast. Each week, Eric and I discuss the VC deals and the drama that went down. Let's do it. Here we go. Ooh, a loyal supporter of the Newcomer Podcast. I think our first advertiser and Christina, the CEO, has been on the show. Anyway, without further ado, you're a startup founder.

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[00:01:28] Simplify compliance and get $1,000 off at Vanta.com slash newcomer. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash newcomer for $1,000 off. Welcome back to the show. We're going to start this week off with our deal of the week, which is super exciting because... Deal of the year. Deal of the year. It's the deal of the year. I mean, it's March, I guess. I mean, I'd like to be surprised. Like, don't speak too soon.

[00:01:58] We could have an amazing IPO window just open right back up. We're obviously talking about Google buying Whiz, the cybersecurity startup, for $32 billion after Google tried to buy it for $20 billion. Then Whiz walked away. Then it seemed like Whiz was going to go public. And now all cash, money flowing into the venture industry. As much as it pains me to say the Trump administration has allowed capitalism and big corporations to do what they do best

[00:02:27] and double down and buy the winners and make sure nobody can ever catch up to them. Yeah. Big winners. Talk about the cash flowing today. As of right now, biggest winners in terms of stake are Index Ventures at 13% and Sequoia Capital at 10% per Katie Roof over at Bloomberg. We have some reporting that that stake at Sequoia is expected to return $3 billion to Sequoia at a 25X multiple, which is, you know, that's a win. Never bet against the Sequoia.

[00:02:56] They got in at the scene. Home run business. Yeah. Doug Leone, former senior steward at Sequoia. NAB's another one, you know, Medallia and a bunch of other exits already. He made his career. Certainly puts him in the top 10 VCs of all time, if not top five. I mean, also Index, you know, Shardul Shah, smart to get into this deal. And he's sort of mid-career in his prime. Index needs that. You know, it's sort of like, oh, this is a guy who's got to win.

[00:03:25] You know, it's good signal. Wins beget wins. That's helpful for Index. Absolutely. Inti Partners has about an 8% stake. And then Green Oaks Capital Partners has about a roughly 6% stake in Wiz. So they all got some good payouts here. Obviously, also Cyberstarts got a 28X multiple on their 46 million investment, which they co-led the seed with Sequoia. So they were also in super early. Yeah, cybersecurity is hot.

[00:03:54] Gilly and Cyberstarts are dominant in cybersecurity. I mean, you know, there's been some skeptical reporting about the potential sort of pay-to-play network that they've built. But at the end of the day, he is very well respected in cyber. I think people are very excited about Israeli cybersecurity startups. And he's got a network of some of the best early stage cyber startups. So definitely one to watch. I don't think the money is flowing right now.

[00:04:23] As someone who once celebrated people for the Figma acquisition, it is worth saying that even though it seems likely that all this money is going to flow and that the Trump administration is clearly looser than the Biden administration, it's possible the deal gets rejected. I mean, Google isn't necessarily the best friend of the Republicans. There's a huge breakup fee. I think part of what got this deal over the line was that Google expanded the breakup fee. It's $3.2 billion, which is massive.

[00:04:52] So they want this to go through. They are ensuring that this happens this time, barring regulatory, you know, overreach, if you will. I would say that this new FTC chair, Andrew Ferguson, while in public appearances, he hasn't really signaled that he's going to fully back off of big tech. There is reporting that they fired, you know, the commissioners that were democratically appointed that were the biggest big tech critics.

[00:05:15] So all signs point to hopefully this going through and being the largest venture exit ever. And we'll all toast and celebrate as if we're part of it, too. Google knows what they're doing here. They have a long history of successful acquisitions. You know, Wiz, obviously sort of known for multi-cloud cybersecurity. Google running Google cloud platform.

[00:05:42] GCP is in third place with AWS and Azure sort of running that table on cloud. So it needs ways for its customers to be multi-cloud and want a reason to use Google. And yeah, Google has an insane track record of acquisitions. Well, this is all hunky-dory. We're so happy. Hopefully this goes through. What does this mean for exits going forward? Like, is the door open? Are we going to have M&A wave? Definitely. We've seen exits.

[00:06:11] Moveworks was acquired for just under, I think, $3 billion by ServiceNow in sort of agent automation. So yeah, I think we're going to see deals. I don't know that it's going to save SaaS necessarily. Like, companies still need to be worth something. I think part of the problem with the deals getting slowed down is that there were companies that maybe would have gotten acquired while they had some momentum and then done poorly

[00:06:38] within the mother company that now don't have enough juice to even get acquired. So I don't know that it's going to fix our sort of graveyard of dot-com unicorns necessarily. But I think people who are leaning into the AI wave, some of them are going to get gobbled up by the big tech giants who want to be relevant. Right. I mean, also there was, you know, CoreWeave's purchase, you know, CoreWeave, IVO hopeful making a purchase of weights and biases to ramp up their AI game.

[00:07:08] Anyone sort of that can spin their unicorn status to have some AI relevance is probably in a better place this time around. Madeline, you've been checking in with investors. You know, we've got the Wiz deal, the CoreWeave filing. What's the mood? Do they think, oh, those are the positives. And of course, the negatives are Trump and tariffs and the general macroeconomic uncertainty and the overall downturn. So between, I don't know, this is our moment.

[00:07:36] We said we were going to exit an IPO when Trump was president versus Trump is scaring the shit out of everybody in the economies and tatters. Which which one's winning? Well, certainly, yeah. No big deal. Just, you know, M&A excitement and economic turmoil and stock turmoil to all wrap up this wonderful IPO. If only Canada would become the 51st state we could move on from all of this. Come on, Canada. My God. Yeah, no.

[00:08:03] The IPO market is not, I would say, looking as rosy as the M&A market per my conversations with investors. I think people are optimistic that this is still going to be better. But I think most of them that I talked to mentioned the forecast being better a year to three years out from now. This year remains uncertain. It's always the next year. Ah, next year it'll be good. Part of that really has to do with this window right now they don't think is closing. I have no evidence to suggest that CoreWeave or Karn are going to delay going out soon.

[00:08:32] But after this wave, what comes after that? We could have another lull if, you know, the tariff drama continues, if, you know, stocks take a turn. And everybody wants to learn from other people's IPOs. So now that we have a couple, if you're planning an IPO, you're like, oh, let's get some data from how these trade and see what happens. Well, that was kind of what I think happened, you know, in 2023 too. Like Instacart, Arm, Klaviyo all went out and it went okay, but not amazing.

[00:09:01] And so, well, Arm was pretty good, but still they kind of like, after that, everyone was like, okay, no, we're going to sit this one out again. I mean, I'm not a big antitrust person, but it's sort of the implicit case for antitrust in that the big tech companies are so big and strong and powerful that they can withstand the insanity of a Trump presidency and also have the ear of the president. So they can gobble things up.

[00:09:26] Acquisitions give investors surefire exits instead of the uncertainty of building a sustainable company on the public markets. And so if we have terrifying public markets and a lax regulatory environment, we may very well just have more consolidation over the next couple of years, which not necessarily ideal for the American economy, but could be good for Silicon Valley if the alternative is no exits. Right.

[00:09:52] And could be good for their LPs lots of times, which are pension funds, university endowments. Wow, what a true believer. Yeah, yeah. Hey, it is a step beyond just the rich VCs, right? No, no, no. Of course. Yeah. We love to see- And I mean, we like to- I mean, it's a good point. I mean, we talked about, oh, $3 billion to Sequoia, but obviously that doesn't go to Sequoia, the partners. You know, some percentage of that is carry and the rest of it is going to their LPs who

[00:10:20] are benevolent institutions for the most part, as you're saying. For the most part. Right. Yeah, of course. That's, I think, the real test point that we're seeing right now is that while people are kind of dipping their toe in with these IPOs and people are excited about the Wiz deal, there's still a lot of uncertainty and a lot of investors are feeling like we got to get liquidity to our LPs as soon as possible, whether that's, you know, secondaries is a third

[00:10:47] thing that people are also, you know, really taking advantage of. Last year was the highest year ever for secondary sales. I think $152 billion per some market reports that I was reading. So people are finding ways to cash out because there just simply has not been a way to do it. And it's seemingly one of the longest IPO droughts that we've had for the history of this industry, which is tough. Who knew 2021 was the glory days? SPACs and sketchy exits.

[00:11:18] Crypto, bonanzas, Zerp. You never know you're in the moment like, oh, this is the harvest moment when you're in it. It feels like, oh, it's going to go on forever. This is just the beginning. Anyway, historic exit. Will it be the biggest of the year? We'll see. But congratulations to Index, Sequoia, Insight, Cyberstarts, Green Oaks. It's nice to have a win. All right. Should we move on? Let's move on. Yeah. Another Green Oaks investment. Rippling is fighting. Suing Deal.

[00:11:47] You want to give people the rundown if they haven't heard this story? I'd say our audience is probably pretty familiar with this story, but I'll give the high points. Basically, Rippling and Deal are both these multi-billion dollar private HR software startups. Big success stories. Parker Conrad, ousted from Zenefits, but now leading Rippling, tweeted out on Monday the court filing of the lawsuit that they've placed against Deal for corporate espionage, citing

[00:12:14] that one of the Dublin employees for the Rippling office had really been looking up things that were very suspicious within different Slack channels. They set a honeypot trap for this guy. They basically like... Rippling sends an email to basically, I think, three deal execs, including the outside legal counsel and the CFO, who's the father of the CEO, which is one of the reasons many people have been suspicious of Deal.

[00:12:44] But not just generally, if your dad's the CFO, people are like, what? So they have this honeypot, according to the lawsuit, that has the execs at the company, according to the lawsuit, then suggests to their insider to check a particular Slack thread that's sort of set up to catch him. The insider does... He searches it like 30 plus times, something ridiculous, like the click-throughs. Rippling goes to the courts in Ireland to get permission to get the guy's phone.

[00:13:13] They confront him. He's in a bathroom. They say, if you don't come out, you're going to get in legal trouble. You're obligated to give us the phone. The guy says, I'm willing to take that risk. And he scrambles. He bolts out of the building. It's literally like, what is this spy thriller HR drama happening in Ireland? This is all according to Rippling. But so interested to see what Deal has to say to defend itself. But it's definitely fun intrigue.

[00:13:42] And for what it's worth, I had been hearing chatter from VCs who were like, I thought the company was sketchy. It's making a lot of money. Seems like it's going well. I feel like there have been sort of buzz building about Deal, which I guess, maybe it's because they're great at corporate espionage. Certainly we're waiting to see more of a statement from Deal. As of right now, they have denied the allegations. There has not been like, you know, a court filing as far as I know, as like a rebuttal in that sense.

[00:14:11] So we'll wait to get a little bit more into it. But I hope their lawyers are as great writers as Rippling's lawyers, you know. And Rippling got Alex Spiro, who's like one of the, you know, lawyers of the moment, I think, in Elon world. So Deal's going to need to get some, you know, I don't know, Trump lawyer of the moment to fight in the muck here. But corporate espionage broadly has been super interesting.

[00:14:37] You know, it's like I think there's an assumption that every company has a Chinese spy embedded in it. Very hard to know how to fend it off. And then this is going to be a cynical capitalist take. But there is a certain like if everybody's doing it, it raises the question like, oh, there are national spies and surely there are some corporate spies. Is Deal, if the allegations are true, just really good at what everybody's doing?

[00:15:03] Or how rare is the idea that somebody would have a deep corporate spy? And, you know, I don't know if we'll ever have a clear answer. That's the thing with spies. They're pretty secretive about that kind of thing. All the corporate global ethics and compliance people are horrified by hearing what you say right now. I covered Uber. I grew up in tech covering Uber. You know, it is a company where it is like the number one prerogative is to win. The old Uber. Uber 1.0. The winner Uber. No.

[00:15:34] Moving on. Would we be a tech podcast if we didn't talk about abundance? Congratulations to Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on your... To Ezra Klein. To Mark Andreessen. I feel like the craziest thing about abundance is like it's the left now, but it's time to build, you know, the Mark Andreessen essay. You know, it's the Mark Andreessen essay. And then Matt Iglesias has the one billion Americans where I do think he gave some credit to Andreessen.

[00:16:02] It's funny that techs now arch Trumpus is the intellectual forefather for the democratic talking point of the moment. I mean, there's something to be said. I think it's cool to see some people on the left embrace this mindset of getting things done and building things. It's a narrative I think people in Silicon Valley are certainly happy to see from prominent voices on the left. What do you make? Right. Yeah. And I don't think it's altogether new.

[00:16:30] I mean, it's been obviously building, but I think it's a good rallying cry. I mean, I think Democrats and the left or liberals know that they need a positive vision besides just like we don't want Trump. I mean, the challenge is just going to be sort of, you know, where the metal meets the road or whatever, you know, it's just if the recipe for abundance is unfettered capitalism, that's not usually the provenance of Democrats.

[00:16:56] And so I think if it's, you know, government building trains, as Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson say, you know, government has been very bad at building trains. Now, maybe we can make government good at it by stripping out some of the regulations and that would be one path. But if it's deregulatory, I mean, I guess I can get on board with that. But it's hard to imagine that becomes sort of the Democratic Party's core message. Right.

[00:17:23] It's very invigorating in theory. I personally also have not read the book, so I don't know how they fully solve all of this. I'm going off of takes, but we'll need to see, you know. Takes all the way down. Takes all the way down. Isn't that a great place to end a podcast? Well, the latest Jason Kalkanis is like, oh, these liberals will never come on, you know, Ezra Klein would never come on. And like, Ezra's like, I have a book to promote. I'm happy to come on the All In podcast.

[00:17:53] So I guess we'll see if we can have a true collision of the left-wing abundance agenda with the right-wing that should be supportive of it. And I'd love to see Marc Andreessen write an essay in response to the book. All right. Stick around for my conversation with the CEO of BrowserBase. We are going to publish on Tuesday a list of some of the buzziest companies in enterprise

[00:18:19] software, according to a survey that Wing, a venture firm we're partnering with, commissioned of venture capitalists. So BrowserBase was one of the buzziest in the early stage category. You'll have to wait until Tuesday to find out exactly where they ranked. But a super exciting company. I spoke with BrowserBase CEO Paul Klein about their headless browser and how that's allowing AI to travel the internet, to use websites.

[00:18:48] Yeah, it was an exciting conversation for a cool, promising company. Stick around and give it a listen. I'm here with Paul Klein, the founder and CEO of BrowserBase. We're meeting on the podcast. Hey, Paul. This is it. It's the first time. Yeah. Great to meet you virtually and excited to be here. I guess that's what happens when you have a rocket ship company. We're having you on the podcast because you're one of the top companies on the ET30 list that

[00:19:15] were partnering with Wing to publish on Tuesday. And so we wanted to dig in to a company and you guys stood out. I think it's both a sort of category that's interesting and one that's sort of, and your company has clearly caught a lot of investor attention. So excited to talk about BrowserBase. You want to just start off? You know, yeah. I mean, we're all, we're meeting you. Your company has come onto the scene. Give us a little bit of context of what got you to founding a company in the first place. Yeah.

[00:19:44] You know, it's, um, it's been a pretty crazy year for BrowserBase. We actually started a little over a year ago in January, 2024, but the journey of BrowserBase has really been one that's threaded through my entire career. So maybe I can kind of give a quick synopsis of that and then show you how all signs pointed to BrowserBase. You know, I actually started my career as an intern at Twilio during their IPO, which is a pretty crazy time, you know, turn 21, you're going into your first all hands.

[00:20:11] And then Jeff Lawson is saying, Hey, uh, here's our S1. We're going to go public this summer. Really kind of baptized into the final stage of, you know, a dev tools and API company and seeing them at the one yard line and cross it and then grow to be this, you know, multi billion dollar revenue company. After I stayed for three years, it was just a really, um, fundamental part of my career where I learned a lot about how to build these great developer tools, infrastructure companies. How do you sell to developers? How do you build developer products?

[00:20:40] Especially these primitives that every developer uses. In that case, it was text-insteaders and phone calls. You ended up going to Twilio full-time, right? I did. Yeah. Well, I think the conversion rate on that one was a pretty high intern class, you know, and I will say a lot of those interns are now founders and they're good friends of mine since then. What role? What did you do? Yeah. It's the Twilio intern mafia of 2016, but I did end up staying. I stayed for three years. I was actually working on login identity products. So I was kind of building the API that authenticated all the APIs and then also the login page and authentication. We'll come back to that later.

[00:21:10] It's a lot of experience. It's important for that reason. But after three years, I said, Hey, this was great. I'm ready to try my hand at it. I started my first company. It was called stream club. We were building Canva, but for live streaming, it was during COVID of course. And we saw a lot of people on the live stream that software wasn't very good. Actually kind of similar to what we're using right now, Riverside, in terms of making it easier to create video in a web browser. That company did okay. It was a hard market to play in. But what we learned about was this interesting technology called a headless browser, which

[00:21:37] is a web browser that you and I run on our computers, but running in the cloud. And yeah, I've seen this term during research for you. Okay. Headless browser is clearly a term I need to understand. Explain it one more time. I want to make sure. Yeah. Yeah. So we were both novices to it too. It's dream. I was a CTO and I was like, okay, I need to use this thing called a headless browser. And what does that mean? So you imagine the browser you're running on your computer. Maybe it's Chrome, maybe it's Safari. You need to run that on a server somewhere, but it's probably not going to look the same

[00:22:07] way that our browser looks on our computer. It's in a server environment. There's no display. It's in a data center somewhere. So a headless browser is a web browser. It's the same as we have on our desktop environments, but running without the display, without the UI. It's just the browser that can be controlled by code. So you've got a headless browser. It's a browser that's controlled by code, not by mouse and keyboard or input. And there are a lot of these already, or this is sort of a product that exists or no? Yeah. It's always been a bit of a hack.

[00:22:35] It's always been something you kind of need to do for at stream club. We used it because we're doing some really interesting, um, basically modifying video display or video overlays with HTML and CSS. The browser is incredible at reading and writing and handling HTML and CSS and JavaScript. Um, and it's always been used for things like testing of software. So if you're building, you know, software, you want to test that your login button works. You're running that in your cloud saying, go to the login page, click the button. Does it work?

[00:23:03] That headless browser is what's used there. People have been using it for things like RPA for a long time. Hey, we have to integrate with some vendor. Here's this hard coded script. It's going to go to this page, find this button using a kind of thing I call a selector. It's a very brittle way of like saying it's the fifth dump. It's the fifth div on the page. It's the 10th button down, click that button. So this headless browser has always been a way to control a web browser programmatically. And developers have used that for a bunch of different use cases and people have been using

[00:23:33] for a long time, but it's always kind of been a hacky thing. So at stream club, I spent much time on this like hacky thing, a setless browser. And it was so painful. It sucked building on top of this type of infrastructure. And what I realized was like, man, this thing sucks to work with. We ended up selling stream club to mux, a video API company in part because of a lot of the headless browser stuff that we built. We really pushed that space forward. I gave a bunch of talks about it. I felt really alone. There weren't many stack overflow answers for headless browser questions I had.

[00:24:01] The source of truth was this guy, Peter's blog. He was the expert. It wasn't like docs on, you know, the Chrome website that were that good. So it was a really tiny, small part of the internet, but I knew a lot about it. We stayed at mux for two years, one building the headless browser stuff. The second year doing what is mux is a video API company. So they kind of, you think of like Twilio is for everything, video, live streaming, video upload, video download, really killer company. I've learned a lot from that team.

[00:24:29] But while we were there, this whole AI thing happened and GPT, chat GPT came out, GPT 3.5 came out. And I started getting a lot of messages from people. People were like, Hey, you've put out a couple of talks on headless browsers. You have some stuff out here about headless browsers. We're using headless browsers in this new way where we're having a LLM try and interact with a webpage on a headless browser programmatically. And can you help us? Cause it's really hard to run this thing in production. People were hitting me up there saying, Hey, like, yeah, we kind of get it working, but

[00:24:58] do you have any advice on how to run thousands of these? And what that kind of turned into was browser based. Browser based is a infrastructure company to run many headless browsers at scale, to make it easier to interact with headless browsers. We power web browsing capabilities for AI applications and AI agents. And if you have this kind of new AI application needs to go out and maybe it's getting, getting clicking buttons on a website, you're going to need your AI application to have a headless

[00:25:28] web browser. And that's what browser base provides. It's in the name. It's a base for your browsers. The, you know, like adept, right? My sense was they were like training a computer with a sense like you're all, you're going to operate the browser and we're going to learn to sort of like go through the human browser. Is that still a strategy that people are considering? Or do you think most of the interaction or are people settled on your solution, which is sort of an abstracted browser and not as a human would it interact with it? Yeah, that's a great question.

[00:25:56] So adept is one of the earliest players in the space. Now most of that team's at Amazon, but they really were cutting it. I mean, they were, they're training models really for UI control with a transformer model. So they were saying, Hey, given this screenshot of a page, where am I going to click? What do I do? They were actually pretty early to this idea of a computer use model or computer use agent. We know that open AI just launched their computer use agent a week ago. Browser base was alongside for that launch.

[00:26:23] We actually co-launched with them to be the browser infrastructure that a computer use model can control. So when you think about computer use models, they're, they're models that can look at a screenshot and say, you're going to want to click right here. You're going to want to type in this. You're going to want to send these key presses. So computer use models actually really need the infrastructure, which is often a browser or desktop environment to, you know, take actions. Right. And this is part of this future where AI is becoming more than just a chatbot.

[00:26:53] It's AI is using tools that's calling APIs. And sometimes if the tool calls unavailable, it might be using primitives like a web browser or a file system or for maybe even a native display. So more and more AI is getting more sophisticated, more capable. And a browser is just one of those primitives that AI is going to use to complete work on your behalf. And we've spent a bunch of time figuring out how to run browsers at scale. Cause it's not an easy task. It's not like running an API. It's a, it's a pretty complex stateful distributed system.

[00:27:22] So are you, you're only focused on the headless browser right now, or you're also doing this sort of computer use interface? Yeah, it's a good, so we are, we have a core product, which is browser-based that is headless browser infrastructure. And what's great about that is that you can run many browsers in many different regions. You can actually get replays of what happens in the browser. So let's say your agent is going and, you know, submitting a form on your behalf. You can watch the replay and say, did it do the right thing? We get observability. Is it text? Like, what are you watching? Are it code or you're watching some new visual?

[00:27:52] It's a full on, so even though it's a headless browser with no UI, we actually have a way to capture what happens on the page and show you like replay, like it was running on your desktop. So we can say, here's where the mouse went. Yeah. So it's headless because it's just in a server environment, but it's not headless. Like it's a blind browser. I see. It's still sort of, there is like a physics to it. Like in a mouse had to sort of move in the computer's mind. Okay. Okay. Now I'm getting it. It's still clicking. It's still typing. It's just not running in a server somewhere.

[00:28:22] It's much more lightweight because it's headless. So that's our core infrastructure product, a lot around running headless browsers to scale. And then we also have a framework. Our framework is called Stagehand. It's an open source framework. And what Stagehand does is that it gives developers better SDKs to control headless browsers. So in our world, there's been several existing frameworks. One's called Puppeteer. One's called Playwright. One's called Selenium. And we have Stagehand. And these are all browser automation frameworks.

[00:28:51] The ones I listed, Puppeteer, Playwright, Selenium, they're more old school. They've been around for a long time. And they're more deterministic, hard-coded. You say, I want this specific button. And it's going to be the fifth button on the page underneath this other button. And if the page changes, that script breaks. They're really built deterministically, but the web is non-deterministic. It's changing all the time, right? So Stagehand, our framework, seeks to make that much more robust.

[00:29:18] Where instead of saying, I want the fifth button on the page, I want the submit form button. And the way we do this is by giving the developer natural language. They describe their workflow in natural language. And then we use an LLM to generate that code to take an action on the web page. And let's say the button moves from the left side of the page to the right side of the page. Or the sign-in button changes to the login button. Your script is still going to work because we're dynamically generating that code to control the browser on the fly. Stagehand is completely open source.

[00:29:47] It's like, to us, if an analogy, Stagehand is to Next.js. Browser base is to Vercel. You know, we are, it's the framework that we recommend using to control a headless browser. But you can use any framework you want. You can use any browser you want. And you want to provide the language model instead, or they can sort of develop a great language model. And you're sort of the tool to get it to hook up to a browser. Yeah, we're just the tool. We don't do any models here. Okay. I'm like, that would be too much to take on. Right, exactly.

[00:30:15] We're the only company in AI grant that I think has never spent money on models. So we definitely don't do any model training here. We leave that to the pros. We leave that to, you know, the open AI, the Anthropic, cool team. To us, like infrastructure as a category, developers want to move between models a lot. You know, they want to try out the latest model. They want to maybe try DeepSeq. Maybe they're back on computer use from open AI. And we seek to kind of stand outside of the models and let the developers bring their own model, but provide all of the scaffolding and infrastructure around that.

[00:30:45] So if they switch models, they don't have to change any of their code. So that's kind of what Stagehand has done a lot about. It's been model agnostic the whole time. You just plug in what you want. Now, some models work better than others on Stagehand. And we've seen more success. What's doing to us? You know, I think I'd have to double check with the team. I think we've been doing some interesting self-computer use. That's been useful in some situations. It really does depend on the workflow. You know, if you have super simple websites, you might need a super simple model. If you're automating a very complex website with just, it's a very large page or it's a very confusing page,

[00:31:14] you might need a more complex model. So it does depend. Right now, I think the best thing on our evals might still be Claude 3.5 Sonnet. So it's especially because it's doing a lot of code gen and 3.5 Sonnet is just really good at code gen. Right. Give us a snapshot of the business or whatever you can say. We're in this moment where, I don't know, people are bragging about revenue growth in small teams. Yeah. Are you trying to keep the team small? Just give us whatever snapshots you can share about how the business is doing. Yeah.

[00:31:41] You know, first things first, it's been a pretty exciting year for us. We went from zero to 20 something people in a year. That's a lot of growth. You know, I do think I look at the zero to 100 million revenue milestones from Cursor. I'm like, damn it. Like, what? Should we be doing that? But it's a different type of business here. We're an infrastructure company. I'm really proud that we have, you know, over 700 customers using BrowserBase from the smallest little startup to, you know, publicly traded companies. We actually had an interesting customer sign up.

[00:32:10] It's a 54-year-old milk dairy supply company. And their first technical engineer they've ever hired, they're like, hey, we're really interested in this AI stuff. We're going to try and automate the way that we go check fuel prices from different vendors and pull it into our spreadsheet so that our team doesn't have to go to the fuel supplier website every single day and check. It's just going to automatically get pulled in. And I think that's pretty cool to see the variety of customers we have across, you know, there's customers like the 11X, you know, doing the ASDR stuff.

[00:32:39] But then there's customers that are doing compliance automation. So it's really vast in terms of use cases and shows the horizontal capability of the team. And from, you know, of course, a lot of customers, some great revenue traction as well. We ended up raising three rounds in 2024. You know, we did our series A and then I got married. So it was a crazy year. I love it. Good. That really capped it all off. And I'm lucky to have some great investors around the table. Kleiner Perkins. Who's the biggest? Who's on the board? Yeah.

[00:33:09] It's Bucky Moore from Kleiner Perkins. Reed Christian from CRV. Atlanta Goyle at Base Case Capital did our pre-seed. It really feels like 2024 really laid the basis for Browser Base, you know, got us the right investors around the cap table, got the right people on the team. Saw a lot of early adopters. And in 2025, we're really seeing kind of the agentic software stack mature. People are using it in production. The model capabilities are getting better. And we've seen that downstream.

[00:33:36] We've had our best month ever every single month for the past four months. Wow. So it's going to keep... I'm kind of terrified for the first non-best month ever whenever that happens because I don't know how the team is going to take it, right? It's a great stat. You know, you're attached to it now. Wow. It is interesting, though. I think that Browser Base has become quite obvious of, like, browser infrastructure as a category that's needed for AI. Yeah. But I certainly remember maybe a year and a half ago, I got a lot of passes for my pre-seed. So I don't know.

[00:34:03] I appreciate that people are waking up and seeing this a little more. I think it's become a lot more obvious. And as a founder, one of the things that I really... It sits on my shoulders is that, for me, Browser Base wins or loses based on execution at this point. You know? It's not market validation. It's not, is this going to be a thing? For us now, it's all execution and we got to go run at it. Let's hit on that. Yeah. Isn't there an extent to which you hinge on, like, how smart AI gets and how capable these models are?

[00:34:32] Or how much do you think if we just sort of sat where we are, there'd be plenty for browser base to do versus you're still counting on these models continuing to... That's what's pretty exciting about the business is that, like, there's actually a very huge non-AI market. Like, every Fortune 500 company uses headless browsers probably for testing or some sort of, like, lightweight automation already. So even if AI disappears tomorrow, if Trump bans AI, there's still a great market here that we're excited about.

[00:34:57] Of course, though, the big, big vision opportunity is this idea of services as software, where there's going to be many new vertical AI companies that are automating certain professions or augmenting certain professions. And the ability to kind of work where people do, which is often in a web browser, that is really core to that vertical AI software category. And we think we're building the picks and shovels for vertical AI software. And we see that in our customer base. We see that in, like, the interesting categories that pop up.

[00:35:26] If you're building a procurement AI tool, you probably need to go to a bunch of websites and figure out, hey, what inventory is available? What are the quotes? Can I submit a quote? Can I submit a bid? Can I aggregate information about the inventory? And then put that back into my model and, like, do some interesting reasoning on top of that. So for us, we think that AI is going to get better. I'm an AI maximalist. I have to be. That's my space, right?

[00:35:48] It's going to get better, faster, cheaper, and that just really creates a lot more demand for the infrastructure, like browser base, that gives AI better capabilities. How much is the headless browser like a flawed interim step, right? Like it's people sort of underestimating what computers can do, right? If you knew what the machines were capable of, you'd build an API and say, oh, we're here. We're ready for you to interact with us.

[00:36:14] And the reason you need a headless browser is there's this company that doesn't realize, oh, it's probably a machine that's going to want to harvest this information instead of a human. Or how do you think about that? Because you're obviously watching, you know, on the other end, there are going to be people just building for the AI to consume it directly instead of using the old human ways of consuming information on it. Yeah, I don't think it's black or white. Like it's not going to be just headless browsers. It's not going to be, you know, computer use. It's not going to be just APIs.

[00:36:43] I actually think it's very clear and necessary that we're going to need to have APIs for the most common use cases. Booking a flight should not go through the website. It should go through the Delta API because it's going to be faster, more reliable. That's going to be the better approach. Though I do believe that humans are going to have to use the Internet for a very long time. And if people are still using the Internet, why do we need to rebuild the Internet for AI when AI is going to be just as capable and smart as we can?

[00:37:10] Like, do I really need to build a second version of my website for AI when AI can actually use the same version of my website? I have to build for people anyways. So to me, it feels like if you want to expand internationally, if you want to work with applications or websites that are in countries that aren't, you know, San Francisco-based startups, you're probably not going to have an MCP protocol for, you know, the Nigerian Employment Bureau, right? That's going to be something that's probably a website, a web forum that you have to interact with.

[00:37:36] And I really do think that, yes, in the longest term, maybe 20, 30 years from now, are we still going to have websites? I don't know, it might be Neuralink just talking to software. So at that point, maybe browser-based might not be relevant. But I think until then, I always, like, look back to Jeff Lawson, one of our angels. And when he was talking about Twilio long ago, he was like, people were like, text messages are going to go away. You don't want to build this company. He's like, yeah, maybe. And look where we are now.

[00:38:03] I still get text messages, you know, 10 years later, $5 billion of revenue later. So I think it is a long bridge. And I guarantee that browser-based won't just be a browser-based or browser company for 10 years. I'm sure there's going to be areas of expansion up into additional agentic infrastructure. But for now, we think this is just a super hot button issue that's really limiting the capabilities of what you can build with AI. And we want to make that really easy.

[00:38:26] What's your read on sort of, I don't know, no machines here, or like, we built this website for humans and we don't want your AI sort of interacting. How much are you seeing that? How much do you honor, like, can people say, like, don't come here with a, I don't know, computer? Yeah. How do you think about that? Yeah. The whole world of bots, bots and anti-bot is a tricky one right now because I actually think that AI has outpaced the internet on this where there used to be pretty much only bad bots.

[00:38:55] And now there's bad bots and good bots. And traditionally, like CAPTCHA is like anti-bot. They really don't know how to tell the difference between a good bot and a bad bot. And this is troublesome for the internet. You know, the internet dynamics are going to change. At this point, the cat is out of the bag, though. AI is going to be using the internet. We've seen this with major AI companies scraping, doing everything. It's something that we can't just put our head in the sand and say, don't come here. But what we can do is think about ways to allow bots to identify themselves and say, hey, I'm a good bot.

[00:39:24] And I'm really excited about some of the stuff that these authentication companies like Okta, Stitch, Blurk are doing. And we partner with them. They're all investors in browser base. We think that the future is going to be a more authenticated internet where your agent is going to be able to log in as you and say, hey, I'm Eric's spot. I'm Eric's agent. I'm here to go check his email for you. Don't block me, please. Eric, get permission. Maybe when you log in, you're going to get a push notification saying, hey, Eric's agent is trying to log into your email. You're going to say, yes, I approve that.

[00:39:52] Can they just politely block you right now? Or if they just say, please don't come, you won't. Or you're like, oh, no, we're trying to figure out. That's on our customers. And for us, we have a TOS saying, if you're breaking downstream TOSes, we're not going to allow that. So our customers need to honor how they use the internet. And if we get someone knocking on our door saying, hey, Eric's using browser base for some bad stuff, you're out of here.

[00:40:14] So we really want to be a good internet citizen because we're building partnerships with the cloud flares, with the Hcaptus of the world to really try and be a trusted browser. Our goal long term is that browser base can be an arbiter of good bots. We want to be able to say, hey, we checked out Eric. He's good. This use case is legit. We think you guys should let him through. And then maybe there's customers who we haven't been able to verify yet. And they say, we don't know about these ones yet, but just flagging for you, this is a browser base browser. We hope that we can kind of build those partnerships. So you're a standard.

[00:40:42] You have a brand and then people say, okay, we trust. There's a company. Well, I hope I'm a trusted guy. You know, I'm pretty easy to talk to you. I'm in San Francisco. If anyone wants to come by our office, 166 Geary Street, you know where we live. I mean, I think about people. That's the beauty of a small company right now. Yeah, exactly. I take my mailbox off the company page. No, I think at this point, what we try and do that others in our space haven't is really just be super candid about where we're at. Come talk to us. Come meet us. If you're curious about the space, we're going to give you honest answers.

[00:41:12] And that's how you kind of can build that trust. When I think about Stripe and Twilio, like you go to telecoms or payment companies, those counterparties, you have to build those trusted partnerships to build these great businesses. Unfortunately, our counterparties are the entire internet. So I have to kind of go wide and talk to maybe these kind of more common like web application firewalls, these WAFs, these capture providers and try and build relationships there. But also just advocate for there are going to be good bots. There are going to be agents that are going to go really create value on your website.

[00:41:42] They're going to actually say, hey, we're going to make sure more people see your inventory is available and hopefully bids on and then buys it. Or we're going to say, hey, show more customers that you have the best cash prices. And we're going to make sure we send truckers your way because that's being put into a system. What are some fun customer use cases or who are the early customers that you think are really getting the most out of browser base? Yeah, we have a bunch of case studies on our website. Some that I think are kind of really unique. This is one company called Benny. And what Benny is, and they actually don't use any AI at all, but they use headless browsers.

[00:42:11] If you are getting food stamps like EBT, Snap, and you maybe buy something, you can actually get a rebate on that if it's a certain category of food. I think it's incentivized people to eat maybe a little healthier. But that process of, you know, listen, you're dealing with the state at that point. The process of submitting that rebate, not very fun, right? So what Benny has built is this really nice consumer app where you can kind of take a picture of your receipt that you use your EBT for, your food stamps for.

[00:42:37] And they're going to go ahead and help you process that rebate back using a headless browser to do all the automation of the form submission. I think that's a really neat use case where it's like, hey, you're helping someone do some work. You're saving them time. And Benny is able to kind of monetize that a little bit because they're charging for the value. I really like that use case because what you really want to think about when you think about the future of agents and the future of software, it's software doing work on your behalf. And most of the work that we do is, you know, in a web browser, on a website.

[00:43:04] So if software is going to work on our behalf and we work on a website, software is going to need a web browser control. And that's what BrowserBase brings to the table. It's that web browser that can be programmatically controlled to automate anything. And that really opens up just a ton of interesting use cases. You know, the world is our oyster. If you look, anything anyone does in a web browser can be automated with AI. And that's just going to keep getting more cost effective over time. In terms of the company growing, I'm really excited for BrowserBase to continue to power these really interesting applications.

[00:43:33] You know, we see customers like Perplexity using BrowserBase. And I'm just really interested to see, like, who is going to be next? Who's building the next great AI company? We have this thing at BrowserBase. We say the next billion-dollar company is going to be built on BrowserBase. And that's exciting to see not only, like, these kind of bigger customers using us, but also kind of these up-and-coming startups. We've had startups that use BrowserBase that raise their seed round, and now they're raising Series Bs.

[00:43:56] And I just really excited to see those ones succeed, too, because I think there's going to be a lot of new unicorns coming out of the 2024 vintage. And we hope that we can be powering them and helping being a core part of their work. Oh, super exciting. Always fun to meet a company early in its journey. And, yeah, glad we get to meet each other on the podcast, hopefully first of many. Yeah, Eric. Thanks so much, man. All right. Cool.